Prepaid healthcard ensures affordable healthcare for Filipinos

Now, it’s easier and more affordable to ensure for healthcare.

With the Medi-Access Card, Healthway Medical, the trusted and most preferred network of mall-based clinics, has launched a new prepaid health card that provides  people with affordable, quality and reliable healthcare.

Unlike the usual health coverage plans, Medi-Access is transferrable. Cardholders can share its benefits to any friend or relative in need of urgent medical attention.

Dr. Lyndon Patrick Dayrit, medical director at Healthway Medical: “It’s everything you need in a card. A wallet for health.” Also unlike those plans, which last only for a year, Medi-Access has no expiration, Dayrit said. “All the benefits stay—aside from the insurance and ambulance

service.”

And since according to the Nielsen Global Survey of Saving and Investment Strategies Q3 2013, which said that “more than half of Filipino active savers (54 percent) are presently engaged in saving for health-related issues,” Dayrit is hopeful that Medi-Access will give them more options to do so. “We hope to usher in a paradigm shift, a shift on how Filipinos regard healthcare—that is, from being reactive to being preventive.”

For P800, the Medi-Access card comes with benefits and privileges like a fixed consultation rate; a 20-percent discount on selected procedures in all Healthway clinics and discounts for surgical procedures at any of Healthway’s affiliated hospitals and clinics, which includes some of the country’s top hospitals like St. Luke’s Medical Center, Makati Medical Center and Chinese General Hospital; and savings on in-patient services.

Insurance, other benefits

Cardholders will also have a P350 hospital daily-income benefit and P5,000 insurance in case of accidental death or permanent disability and a free ambulance service twice a year, courtesy of Pilipinas 911 and PhilLife Financial, respectively.

Medi-Access has no age-limit and premedical requirements. It has a Web-based system for tracking. It can be used in all Healthway clinics and 20 partner-hospitals and clinics and can be reloaded in all Healthway clinics or through Metrobank.

Healthway recognizes the need for a health card “to cover [for the healthcare] of all members of our family,” Dayrit said. “[This is why] Medi-access is specially targeted for nonprincipal beneficiaries, small-scale entrepreneurs and overseas workers.” But it is also helpful for employees because, according Carmie de Leon, vice president for sales and marketing, since it  can complement PhilHealth and company  health coverage packages.

The Medi-Access card joins the list of Healthway  products like HealthCheq and the HealthWallet, all of which aims to make healthcare easy, affordable, and accessible. Noli A. Ermitanio